Monthly Archives: February 2009

Wow, what a week. We launched the Hardware Upgrade appeal last Thursday to raise £10,000. And just 2 days 15 hours and 20 minutes later in the small hours of Sunday morning we reached that target.

This all happened so quickly we were astonished and totally humbled by the generosity and goodwill towards the project. It happened so quickly in fact that we felt that a lot of people wouldn’t even have had an opportunity to donate, so we decided to keep the appeal open a bit longer.

So after exactly a week we are formally closing the appeal having raised £16,222. The donate site will still stay up but we’ll change the wording so that it’s for general fund raising and not focused on any particular need.

We have some very big thank yous to make. Firstly, we are enormously grateful to Google. The guys from the Google Open Source Programs Office really appreciate what we are doing and donated £5,000. Awesome.

Second we have to thank CloudMade. Steve and Nick are always the first people to dig deep and support the project, whether it’s tile hosting for cycle maps, organizing mapping parties or sponsoring the State of the Map conference. Once more they didn’t hesitate and donated £2,000. Thank you CloudMade.

Third, Richard Weait deserves mention. Richard does a lot for OpenStreetMap. Running mapping parties in North America, talking at countless Linux User Group meetings, coordinating mass geodata imports and, um, designing curling icons. On top of all this he donated $1,000 out of his own pocket. Props.

And last, but definitely not least, we need to thank every single other person who made a donation. Collectively you raised all the rest – in true crowd sourced style. Your roll of honour is here. Each and every single donation is really appreciated. Thank you guys.

We’ve raised enough for a new database server. It will probably be a better spec than we had planned or hoped for, so it should see us good for some time.

And with the remaining funds? Well I think everyone agrees that the wiki server could use some better hardware so we’ll be able to take care of that. Beyond that, if the community has any ideas then we’d really like to hear suggestions for what else needs a bit of a boost. Please tell us which other core services you think would benefit from a bit of help.

Check out Fedora Geo Spin – “Fedora Geo Spin is a collection of mapping tools that run on Fedora. This includes tools for map making, integration into OpenStreetMap, and components that can be run on a GPS enabled device.”

Our first set of ‘real’ servers was installed by me (SteveC), Nick Black and Nick Hill utilising the latest in safe server transport – Nick Hill’s overloaded Peugeot. Here they are being modelled:

Today we’re kicking off a funding drive to raise £10,000 to buy new API database servers for the upcoming new API and server software which we call “0.6” as it’s the 6th version. Specifically we’re after a 3U Rackmount server, 2x Quadcore, 24GB RAM, 10x SAS 15kRPM disks.

OpenStreetMaps exponential growth since day one has led to increasing demands on the hardware and software clockwork which make it tick day and night, and this funding drive will put us in a fantastic position to cross the next hurdles of mapping the planet. We have incredibly dedicated volunteer sysadmins and coders building OSM today, so let’s give them the best tools for the job to continue building the most detailed map of the planet.

So please consider heading over to donate.openstreetmap.org and chip in some cash for the cause. We’ll keep you up to date with the process of buying, setting up and installing the new hardware.